Fracking Boom Slouching Toward Bust

Americans are being subjected to a massive PR assault attempting to persuade them that shale gas and tight oil have brightened America’s energy future. What has really changed is the nation’s energy conversation: until recently, it was about how we should reduce our dependency on depleting, climate-changing fossil fuels. Now our “conversation” has become a one-sided harangue about the energy, jobs, and tax revenues the industry insists will flow from fracking from now ’til kingdom come, and how these outweigh environmental concerns.

The data do not support these claims. Therefore it is critically important that we return America’s energy focus to the most critical imperative of our time—the necessary and inevitable transition away from our current dependence on fossil fuels.